Analytics is a big business. It's not just about building a product, you need to know how to optimize it. Time can be spent more efficiently when you have the data required to point you in the direction of problems. To that end, Cloudflare—of DDoS mitigation fame—is releasing the Cloudflare Mobile SDK to help app developers better optimize networking performance.

From the ashes of the popular CyanogenMod custom ROM, LineageOS has emerged as a worthy successor, providing users the same near stock experience with a few useful customization options. Now, Lineage is introducing an SDK in a bid to get developers building interesting things based on its own APIs.

Google announced this week that two of its projects are going open source. Code for both DeepLab-V3+, the latest version of Google's semantic image segmentation AI model, and Resonance Audio, Google's spatial audio SDK, is now freely available.

You might remember our intermittentcoverage of Android Automotive — not to be confused with the near-identically named Android Auto. The (really) short version is that Android Automotive is a full Android implementation in a car, rather than just a dumb projection of your phone. And, according to the folks at XDA, Google might be building an emulator for it in the Android SDK.

Now that Google is through with its biggest developer conference of the year, it's time to deliver a few updates and fulfill some of the promises made during the event. Some of that is happening through an update to Play services. Google posted the release notes for the update and it includes a lot of additions, both big and small, and a few deprecations.

One of the reasons Amazon's Alexa assistant has become so popular is because it can be integrated into nearly everything. We've seen phones, speakers, and even refrigerators with Alexa. Now Google is opening up Google Assistant to the same level of accessibility, with the new Google Assistant SDK.

This should come as no surprise to anyone, but Google has released the final version of the Android Wear 2.0 SDK. It adds support for everything announced with the LG Watch Style and Watch Sport yesterday, and also makes a few revisions to some of the app approval processes. On that note, there are two things in this final version to pay attention to (if you're a developer).

One of the many announcements at Microsoft's Windows Developer Day was "Project Rome," a way for Universal Windows Platform applications (apps from the Windows Store) to have cross-device services. In addition to supporting all the various Windows 10 platforms (PC, Windows Mobile, Xbox, etc), Microsoft has also released the Project Rome SDK for Android.

Ask all of the mobile app developers to name the SDKs and third-party services they're using and the answer you're likely to hear more than any other is Fabric, or possibly Crashlytics (a component of Fabric). Many apps rely on Fabric for crash reporting, performance metrics, and other services that are hard to build in-house, but prove very useful when supporting an app and making business decisions. Fabric announced earlier today that it had reached an agreement to be acquired by Google, leaving behind its parent company Twitter.

As an Android nerd, there are times you probably need ADB or fastboot to mess around with your phone. Maybe you're flashing an OTA or unlocking the bootloader. You used to need to grab a giant package of other junk from Google to get them, but no more! Google has started hosting platform tools downloads without the other stuff that are a mere 3.5MB.